From playing with robots we tried an actual application of robotics. We had the Segways 101 course at the St. Louis Science Center.
The lesson itself was fun, with an entertaining video of people falling off Segways. They also had a little obstacle course to let you try doing all of the things the video told you not to do (but most of it was for the more advanced class).
Afterward, we discussed the fact that this too was robotics and a pretty advanced application at that. We did not talk much about how the Segways were supposed to revolutionize urban transportation but students did recognize the fact that aesthetics were a major impediment to their broader adoption.
The price was a bit steep however, and I’m a little conflicted about if it was worth it.
The kits come with a micro-controller, a few motors and some sensors. While there are quite a number of ways of assembling these to make robots, the ones at the science center were pre-built except that you could just plug in a bulldozer or sweeper attachment (and a head which was purely decorative). This limited the degrees of freedom to three, which made it easier to program something useful in the hour we had with the robots.
The programming is very basic. There are two sets of instructions, one to control the movement of the robot in general, and one to control its response when the sensor detected a change in the environment. The objective of the science center’s game was to clear off a set of objects from a white rectangle within five minutes.
You could tell the robot to move forward, back or rotate while it’s on the board and to activate its sweeper or shovel. So a full program could have just five elements; general: lower shovel –> move forward –> rotate; sensor: move backward –> rotate. With these strict limitations, the programming interface is also very simple; you plug in blocks with each instruction in the series for either the general movement or the sensor reaction. With all this simplification, I’m not sure just how much the students learned about programming from our short session.
The full kit from Lego offers more freedom to design robots and thus more flexibility with the programming interface so with a little thought it could be easily integrated into the curriculum. At about $300 each the system is a bit pricy, we’d probably need to get one kit for each small group of 3-4 kids. They would probably be worth it however if we used them more than just once.
I’ve been playing with the Basic Stamp micro-controller for a while, and while it offers almost infinite flexibility, making it more useful for practical applications, it does not provide the immediate gratification of the robots, and the ease of assembly to make it the better tool for introducing robotics to middle schoolers. I still, however, tend to favor practical applications, so perhaps I can persuade a student to do an advanced project to build an automatic window for the greenhouse.
The session at the Science Center was worthwhile. All of the students seemed to enjoy it. It provided a nice integration of the mechanics and electronics we’ve been learning about all year, and a glimpse of where technology is taking us in the future.
Why take a group of middle schoolers on a tour of the Anheuser-Busch factory? After all, no one will be trying any samples and the main point of the museum and the tour itself is to make people feel good about the company and buy more of its products. Which would be beer.
Rail track leading into the brewery.
The answer is that the history of the company ties directly into the history of the industrial revolution in the U.S.. Its large scale industrial process was made possible by the serendipitous German immigration into St. Louis in the late 1800’s. Just then the expansion of grain farming in the mid-west and the railroads could supply the raw materials for beer on a massive scale. New assembly lines and automation could efficiently process these inputs, resulting in large scale production. Successes bred new inventions, with the company retaining the services of Rudolph Diesel to introduce his engine to the U.S..
Assembly line producing hundreds of bottles a minute with only five workers.
The survival of the company during prohibition (1920-1933) was another point of interest. Anheuser-Busch survived by diversifying from its core business, making non-alcoholic drinks and selling baker’s yeast among other things. At the end of prohibition, Anheuser-Busch was the only large brewer left in the city St. Louis.
Barley.
We also saw a bit of chemistry during the tour. The breakdown of complex starches into sugars as part of the fermentation process is a basic example of organic chemistry in action (polymers –> monomers). Light beer, for example, is kept in the tanks longer so that more of the starches are broken down into simple sugars. There were even a couple of big models of barley grains and hops buds showing their parts, that tie in to our life-science lessons next year.
First encounter with the barrage of advertising.
Even the surfeit of advertising could be used to advantage; the first thing inside the door of the museum is a television playing Anheuser-Busch’s most successful commercials. We’ve been discussing propaganda all year, so the students were somewhat inoculated to the barrage of feel-good messages, and we specifically discussed this in our post-tour group meeting.
Our tour guides were great. Informative, friendly and willing to answer questions, I particularly appreciated that they joined us in our group discussion after the tour and answered the questions that came up as best they could.
The St. Louis City Museum is an excellent place for the kinestetic. They assembled scrap metal from all around the city, including coils of metal, wire fencing, steel-plate slides and airplane fuselages, and gave it to artists to produce an exceptional, innovative playground.
Wire tubes extended across the air, two-three-four stories high, barely wide enough to crawl through. If you’re claustrophobic and afraid of heights you would think it would be a nightmare, but the wire mesh is sturdy enough that you feel secure, while being open enough to so you don’t feel closed in.
There’s other stuff inside the museum, the staff says it’s always under construction, including a warehouse of gargoyles and building facing saved from demolition, however it’s the outside that’s most remarkable.
Molten glass, upwards of 2000 degrees, cools slowly, quickly, slow enough to pull, twist, fast enough to feel the brittleness between metal tweezers in seconds. Runny to viscous as it cools. Change of state — freezing — feel it in the glass.
Tweezers and jacks keep hot glass at a distance. Third class levers require balance and firmness to control their mechanical advantage.
Glass, silica, SiO2. Quartz crystals, ordered array of molecules. Glass, no organization, amorphous.
Furnaces blast hot, you can see the yellow-orange color, you can feel the hard infra-red light, thermal energy. IR – long wave – less energetic. When extra heat is needed, the blue/ultra-violet flame of propane (mixed with oxygen). UV – short wave – high energy – hard on the eyes though you can’t see it.
Combustion needs three things, heat, fuel and oxygen. Propane, C3H8, not methane, CH4 – the greater energy density. Propane, C3H8, not butane, C4H10 – is a gas not a liquid. To burn real hot needs extra oxygen.
Propane torch.
Conservation is a challenge. Furnaces –> heat –> lots of energy –> bad. Natural light, big doors, lots of windows. Recycle glass (at least the clear glass). No need for heat in the winter. Drink lots of water in the summer.
3rd Degree Glass Factory, make your own paperweights. About 12 minutes per person. Excellent way to spend a morning. Really cool faucets and water basins in the bathroom.
Lambert’s Cafe is an interesting cultural icon. Seriously small-town and farm-country, the staff all wear red suspenders and bow ties. Seating in long wooden benches, and the drinks in enormous, reusable plastic cups. The cups really captures the ethos. Red, black and blue, they are cheap, thick walled and have see a lot of use, so much so that the logos and markings on many of them are coming off.
They also throw rolls to you from across the room. It’s their thing. It’s a lot of fun, although under and over throws can come as a bit of a surprise to the unsuspecting. Someone is always walking around with tins of sorghum mollasses and apple butter which are quite good.
At any rate, Lambert’s is located at a convenient half-way point between Memphis and St. Louis, so it makes for a reasonable break on the long drive.
Rio de Janeiro slum (right) on hill, contrasted with a more affluent neighbourhood, as viewed from a tram in Santa Teresa; Cristo Redentor is in the left background. (Image by chensiyuan on Wikimedia Commons)
The way we write and the way we speak have an enormous impact on our success in life. Formal language has a sequential, cause-and-effect structure that favors steady continuity which facilitates logical argument. It’s what we try to teach. It is the language of education, office-work and, in our society, the middle class.
Casual language has a very different narrative structure, starting at the emotional high-point, emphasizing relationships and requiring audience participation. It is the language for engaged storytelling. In our society, for the most part, formal language is valued while casual language is not. Casual language is used, most often, by people in poverty.
The separation imposed by these two forms of language defines the “culture of poverty” described by Ruby K. Payne in her book, “Framework for Understanding Poverty“. Payne argues that there are profound cultural differences between the poor and the middle class that tends to propagate poverty from generation to generation.
The poor tend to value interpersonal relationships, emotional responses and short-term interactions while the middle class favors self-sufficiency, logical responses and planning for the future. And these values manifest themselves most obviously in casual versus formal language. Because language is cultural and is passed on with culture, so is poverty. Poverty is self-perpetuating.
[For] students to be successful, we must . . . teach them the rules that will make them successful at school and at work. – Payne (2003)
Payne’s work is popular, over one million books sold and she trains over 40,000 educators a year (Ng and Rury, 2009), but she is not without her strident critics. Image from Jakarta by Jonathan McIntosh
Most of the criticisms appear to be based on the fact that her work is anecdotal, not scientifically based, especially since there is some scientific evidence that conflicts with her observations. Ng and Rury, (2009) emphasize that poverty is a complex issue:
Our analysis, however, demonstrates statistical associations of varying strengths between children’s educational success and a host of different circumstances impacting their lives. Poverty itself is a serious issue, no doubt. Its lone impact may not be as significant as other factors, though, and it often works in conjunction with other disadvantaging variables. – Ng and Rury, (2009)
In thinking of applying this book, Michael Reinke’s review of Payne’s book concludes that, “a recommendation for use of this book either in the classroom or the general workplace would only come with some significant reservations.” Also, “A Framework for Understanding Poverty is a good start for the uninitiated student or professional working for the first time with a low income population. At the same time, it must be read in the context of a broader conversation on poverty. To view it as the sole source for developing classroom strategies would do a disservice to all involved.”
The greatest utility of Payne’s book may be where she discusses instructional techniques and how to improve instruction.
It is in the chapter where Payne has the most experience, “Instruction and Improving Achievement,” that she takes the more immediate approach. Identifying input strategies, designing lesson plans around cognitive strategies, and conceptual frameworks for instruction all provide a starting point for the teacher looking for assistance and for the student trying to learn. It may or may not be true that the concept of “hidden rules” has merit, but the teacher in the classroom–never mind the student–is likely to benefit from more concrete strategies addressing specific concerns. – Michael Reinke
Payne does back up her recommendations for instruction with the scientific literature so, as a result, a lot of it looks like what you see in the Montessori training. A piecewise comparison of Payne’s general instructional techniques and the Montessori Method (see Lillard, 2005) would make for an interesting project. I’ve also come across some good exercises that I think will apply very nicely to middle school.
When we create presentations we combine multiple sources of information and reinterpret them in new ways. Presenting demonstrates more sophisticated learning. Yet as we we organize and categorize we fit the reinterpreted information into models and these models themselves impose their own logic. Models are defined by their own rigidity of organization and thinking that can straightjacket both the viewer and the creator of the presentation.
PowerPoint is a ubiquitous and powerful tool. Most of students favor it for their presentations. However, PowerPoint’s model requires breaking things down into bulleted lists, a hierarchical array of topics and subtopics. It makes it harder to show interconnections.
The U.S. military is becoming worried that their extensive use of PowerPoint is making their job harder.
“It’s dangerous because it can create the illusion of understanding and the illusion of control,” General McMaster said in a telephone interview afterward. “Some problems in the world are not bullet-izable.” – Bumiller (2010)
Elizabeth Bumiller has an excellent article in the New York Times about the effect of PowerPoint on the military titled, “We Have Met the Enemy and He Is PowerPoint“. It’s a great reminder of why students need to practice a variety of different presentation techniques.
slides impart less information than a five-page paper can hold, and that they relieve the briefer of the need to polish writing to convey an analytic, persuasive point. – Bumiller (2010)
